The focus of this month's newsletter stays on people and
how to use them effectively in your organization to drive
business results. In these times of low cost technology and
talent shortage, your people are your key differentiator
between you and your opposition. I know this point is often
stated. However, how many of us truly believe it and use it
to our - and our employees' - mutual advantage?

Our feature article this month is from our senior associate,
Jennifer McCoy. Jennifer examines the changing nature of work
and what you need to do about it. Faced with an ageing
workforce, the difficulty in keeping Gen Y and the endemic
skills shortage, are you asking the right questions? Read on
and find out.

Thank you to
our customers that purchased our newly released leadership
succession planning tool: Succession Planner. We
released this easy to use tool at an opportune time as a
recent Chandler Macleod survey revealed that 49% of all
organizations have no succession plan in place. Feel free to
drop us a line and let us know what you think of our new
tool.

This month, keep an eye out on our Home page for our upcoming
Training Evaluation Toolkit. Measuring the
effectiveness and ROI of company training programs has been
talked about for a long time. However, many HR and training
professionals have been afraid of quantifying the benefits of
their programs. This toolkit contains all of the guidance,
templates and worksheets for both the novice and experienced
professional alike.

Have you
noticed how your workplace has changed? You may be struggling
with the skills shortage. Or coming to grips with Gen Y, the
group attracting all the media attention and frustrated
conversations over dinner. Or you may be dealing simply with
the pace of change and the increasing pressure to deliver.
Whatever is most obvious to you, certainly the pace of those
changes seems to be accelerating.

Perhaps you've assumed the problem was localized. In fact,
the problem is far wider. The challenge is that skills
shortages are global and the situation will probably get
worse before it gets better. We're running out of skilled
people. The pool is diminishing and that "war for
talent", predicted in business articles, is already here.
In a world where technology is a leveler, highly skilled,
creative people provide the sole competitive edge for a
business. Talent and skills plus innovation drive business
success, if not survival.

The dearth of people is fairly simple to explain. Declining
birth rates from the second half of the 20th century,
combined with the ageing of existing populations, are rapidly
distorting the traditional demographic picture of society
across the industrialized world. This is equally true of some
of the emerging economies like China and India. There would
seem to be an incongruity between accounts of an
overpopulated world and the realities of declining
workforces. However, the United Nations Department of
Economic and Social Affaires has captured the realities of an
ageing population globally in a pictorial map showing the
percentage of the population that will be aged 60 years or
over in 2050 - around 30% across these nations. Skills
might be scarce now, but as our populations age the situation
will become more acute.

The problem is a little more complex though. We're also
losing people because we don't know how to keep them -
the young, talented Gen Y with the world almost literally at
their fingertips. We're discarding others because we
don't know how to use them effectively - the Baby Boomers
with their lifetimes of experience but, sometimes, outdated
technological skill. If we're going to solve the problem
for the long term we're going to need to learn how to keep
people at work and work collaboratively with everyone in
these new workplaces. We're going to need to ask some more
questions about the way we work with people and then seek
some interesting solutions.

Since skilled people are so much in demand, critical
questions for business surely must be:

"What do we need to do to develop
the potential of all the staff we've got now?", and

"What can we do to keep these
people?"

An even better
question to ask is:

"What do they need from us to
enable them to be creative and to come up with ideas that
will serve us well or give us a competitive edge?"

Unfortunately,
it would seem these questions are not asked frequently
enough.